Free The Blackpool Highflyer by Andrew Martin Page A

help the working class fight or does it hinder?'
    'I don't know,' I said.
    'Take this town, Halifax,' said the long-haired fellow. 'It's like a bottle with the stopper in. Fifty-one weeks of the year, everyone's cooped up in the mills, prisoners of the wage slav­ery. Then for one week - wakes - the stopper comes off and it's the mad dash to the seaside. Now if that didn't happen there's a fair chance the bottle would explode.'
    'Why?' I said. 'Why would it explode?'
    He sighed, looked down sadly at the empty lemonade glass. 'I forgot to say the bottle is a bottle of selzer, or maybe beer. Something volatile, any road. Something likely to explode. Alan has it right but I can't remember exactly how he puts it.'
    'Selzer will not expand in the bottle in any circumstances,' I said, finishing my Ramsden's.
    'Well,' said the socialist,'... we'll see about that.'
    I put down my pint pot. 'So you're dead set against Black­pool because folk like it?'
    'In a way yes,' said the long-haired fellow, who now brushed his hair right back from his face as if he'd suddenly lost all patience with it. 'Everything that increases the dissatisfaction of the working man must push him in a revolutionary direction.'
    'And what do you think of Scarborough?'
    'That's another . . .' And here he muttered something I couldn't catch.
    'Another what?' I said, and he came out with it this time, for he was a fellow who warmed up by degrees.
    'Another latrine,' he said.
    'Well then,' I said, 'would you blokes in the Socialist Mission ever stop a train that was carrying working people to Black­pool or Scarborough? Would you ever wreck it, I mean?'
    At this, he walked over to the billiard table and took up his newspapers again. 'Why do you ask that?' he said turning around, the newspapers once more under his arm.
    I told him.
    'Well,' he said. 'You must come along to our meeting to know more, and you must speak to Mr Cowan himself. But I'll tell you here and now that one difference between us and the standard run of liberal-labour idiots is that we under­stand there is a fever for action in the mills and factories of all the working towns in the country, and if the workers won't rise of their own accord they must be pushed to it.'
    I stared at the fellow, with the happy ringing of the till in the background. Had he just owned up to murder?
    'But no,' he went on. 'We didn't wreck your excursion.' He half smiled in a way I didn't much like; I'd seemed in a funk, and that had galvanised him in some way. The smile changed as I watched, though, becoming something a little pleasanter. He was only a kid; good-looking, in a way; and Clive Carter
    would have killed for that hair of his. He should have been out courting on a Friday night like this.
    'What's your name?' he asked me.
    I was tired of being asked for my name, for I felt I was being written down in all sorts of bad books, but I gave it him any­way. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.
    'Jim Stringer,' he repeated. You felt he wasn't given a name very often, and that when he was, he made the most of it.
    'What's yours?' I said.
    'Paul,' he said. And he nodded to me before walking back out into the street.
    I took up the paper he'd passed to me and read it over a lit­tle. It was all a lot of big, windy promises: 'There will be a general expropriation of vast proportions'; 'All distinctions between classes and nations will be lost', and so on. Half the articles were headed: 'Alan Cowan writes', others were 'by a comrade'. I knew there was something queer about it from the outset but for a little while I couldn't say what. It was like looking at a night sky and slowly working out that there was no moon. Somewhere or other, there should have been a little complicated dull part where you were told who it was printed by and where, and how you might get in touch with the editor. But there was no such thing to be seen.
Chapter Six
     
    I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the start, come to that, but I